Hydro Economic Asymmetries and Common‐Pool Overdraft in Transboundary Aquifers

Abstract

The common‐pool nature of groundwater resources creates incentives to over pump that contribute to their rapid global depletion. In transboundary aquifers, users are separated by a territorial border and might face substantially different economic and hydrogeologic conditions that can alternatively dampen or amplify incentives to over pump. We develop a theoretical model that couples principles of game theory and groundwater flow to capture the combined effect of well locations and user asymmetries on pumping incentives. We find that heterogeneities across users (here referred to as asymmetries) in terms of either energy cost, groundwater profitability or aquifer response tend to dampen incentives to over pump. However, combinations of two or more types of asymmetry can substantially amplify common‐pool overdraft, particularly when the same user simultaneously faces comparatively higher costs (or aquifer response) and profitability. We use this theoretical insight to interpret the emergence of the Disi agreement between Saudi Arabia and Jordan in association with the Disi‐Amman water pipeline. By using bounded non‐dimensional parameters to encode user asymmetries and groundwater connectivity, the theory provides a tractable generalized framework to understand the premature depletion of shared aquifers, whether transboundary or not.

Mapping the landscape of water and society research: Promising combinations of compatible and complementary disciplines

“…For example, infrastructure operations that hydro‐economic models seek to optimize are often set to address time variations in water availability (floods and droughts) and demand (Harou et al, 2009). However, in some cases, water system outcomes are governed by spatial , rather than temporal, dynamics (Mullen et al, 2022). HM might therefore be represented as {w −1 ,w 0 ,w 1 } = {2,1,1} on the time–space axis of the “Starting point” dimension of the typology.…”

“…Coupled human‐water systems (CHWS), where human activities and water resources interact dynamically in space and time, arise in a wide variety of settings that include flood protection (Di Baldassarre et al, 2013), agriculture (Giuliani et al, 2016; Grafton et al, 2018), urban water supply (Savelli et al, 2021; Srinivasan et al, 2013), catchment hydrology (Srinivasan et al, 2015; van Emmerik et al, 2014) and transboundary water interactions (Mullen et al, 2022; Penny et al, 2021) among many others. This diversity of contexts has allowed CHWS to be studied by a wide variety of disciplines, which is both an opportunity and a challenge.…”

Transboundary flows in the metacoupled Anthropocene: typology, methods, and governance for global sustainability

“…Studies on waterrelated flows account for 6% of the evaluated studies, followed by pollutants (2%), animal migration (2%), and species dispersal (1%). Among water-related flow studies, > 90% focused on transboundary surface water, while only a small portion of the studies investigated transboundary groundwater or aquifers (Müller et al 2017, Mullen et al 2022. Future studies need to include groundwater as a crucial element in transboundary watershed governance.…”

“…Future studies need to include groundwater as a crucial element in transboundary watershed governance. Additionally, it is essential to conduct a more extensive investigation into the "causes" (such as excessive pumping in one system) and "effects" (such as drawdown in the other system and common-pool overdraft) of groundwater flow across systems, particularly in internationally shared river basins (Mullen et al 2022).…”